Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Garrett – Cool, cool. A good MMO question that’s being asked actually, and this is important for all MMOs right now is, “As far as content goes are you guys focusing more on leveling, or are you focusing more on end-game, and what kind of balance of those two features will you have?”

Craig – It is, it’s a really interesting balance. I think that it was at the MMO panel, and I can’t remember who said it, but I really think that it really works for Star Trek. When we got the license, we didn’t sit in a room and say, “OK, how can we jam Star Trek onto an MMO?” We sat and were like, “What is Star Trek? What do people expect out of this game, and then how can we make this into an MMO?”

For people who’ve seen interviews, or seen me type, you’ll hear me say this all the time. Star Trek is different things to different people. And exploring is going to be an activity that you get to do. There’s going to be the episodic content – the story driven content that you’re going to do. There’s going to be the end-game, the PvP, the indirect PvP. I think that it really is a question of offering people choices of what they get to do, and when they feel like doing it as opposed to, “OK, it’s linear, you level, then you go end-game.” I don’t think it’s as simple as that anymore with MMOs.

Garrett – Very cool. A quick question from Sir Cedric is, “Will there be admirals, player admirals in the game so that they can give missions to other players?”

Craig – There will be player admirals in the game, you will be able to achieve the rank of admiral. I doubt that at launch we’ll have it so that you’ll be able to actually task other people with missions in the game. Probably you’ll end up seeing that sort of stuff happening within the fleet system, but not in a game-supported fashion.

Garrett – Cool. What about space combat? I’m going through these as best I can. It says, “It looks like you’re leaning towards planed, flat-style battles, but will you be able to fly above or below your opponents, to kind of sneak up from underneath or something like that?”

Craig – Definitely. It is not a plane, it is 3D. It’s not a full-on ‘dog fighter I’m gonna get gimbal-locked’ 3D. We do want people to have a sense of space, and a sense of their orientation, but it is 3D, you do go under you do go above and you do sneak up on people that way. It’s one of the easiest ways to get from afore to the aft shields of somebody is to kind of pop under them.

Garrett – Cool, I’m just looking at this question here talking about the post launch content, and I know you touched on it before, but they were saying, “Is there something that you could say that would calm the fears that post launch content might not get the same attention.” And I know you talked about episodic content, which I think that alone is amazing, so…

Craig – Yea, I guess I giggle a little if people are afraid that post launch content is not going to be addressed. An MMO is not going to be successful in this market (I’ll put my business hat on I guess) If you don’t provide the users constant updates, constant content. At Cryptic Studios in our plan, the dev team doesn’t shrink when you launch the game. The dev team stays there, the dev team provides support, does quality of life fixes and continues to add content to the game.

I don’t think you can ship an MMO and then not support your customers. It’s one of the most exciting things about developing an MMO too, because it turns into an interactive development where your customers actually get to tell you what they want, tell you what you like. And then you get to kind of mold the game and help try to give them the universe that they want to play in.

So Cryptic Studios definitely, definitely believes in continually building content.

Garrett – Cool. The other one that I’m looking at real quick, which is raid-style content. “Do you plan on having any kind of PvE raid content? How many people will be able to go? Will the raids be on the ground, will they be in space?” There’s certainly a lot to mess around with there.

Craig – And that’s one of the things that we’re really iterating on internally right now. There definitely will be raid level content in the game. The full on details – how many people, space or ground – we don’t have all the details worked out, but I mean, we already go in and fight Borg Cubes with 10, 15 of us on the dev team. So I guess that’s what I’d call raid level content.

Garrett – I think everybody now wants to go work there Craig, after you said that.

*laughter*

I think you have a large amount of people now just driving off to California…